


Bitter Pines

by Darling_Jack



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Chapter 1: Colter (Red Dead Redemption 2), Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Starvation, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:26:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29561868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darling_Jack/pseuds/Darling_Jack
Summary: The storm that consumes Colter doesn't break- but Arthur does.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49





	Bitter Pines

**Author's Note:**

> TW for intentional self-starvation and animal death.

It’s cold in Colter. 

A simple thought, one that bubbles to the very front of his mind without warning. It’s enough to make him laugh, if he weren’t so damn miserable. 

It’s cold. 

Of fucking _course_ it’s cold. 

His entire body aches, numb in places and absolutely aflame in others, the icy chill cutting right down to his marrow and sticking there. If Arthur didn’t know better, he’d think he was freezing from the inside out. Though awake, he dreams of whatever lies just beneath the mountains; surely, the icy plains didn’t stretch on forever. He dreams of being able to move his fingers without his bones howling; of being able to feel his cheeks, and to breathe without it hurting as though he’d inhaled fine shards of glass. 

They’re just dreams though. The world beyond these rotting walls was white through and through, the air so heavy, so packed, with driving snowfall that he wasn’t sure anyone could breathe without drowning in it. 

The snowstorm that stranded them here hadn’t quieted in the least. Biting winds rattled the decrepit remnants of Colter, forcing the temporary inhabitants inside. The sun soon was blocked out entirely as the world around the camp was thoroughly consumed.The pines that stood tall around the camp, bastions, makers, bowed beneath the wind and ice. They cracked and wavered in a way Arthur simply could never grow used to. 

Charles and Arthur barely made it back with the deer. 

Both men were shivering fiercely, soaked to the bone and powdered with ice and snow. They were greeted by a silent camp, all sound eagerly muted by the rapidly piling snow. The horses, those that hadn’t already succumbed to the unnatural cold, had been pulled into the barn, crammed together in the hopes that perhaps the small herd might keep each-other alive through body heat alone.

People were nervous.

He could hear it. Uneasy whisperings; doubts spread among them like cancer. 

Dutch was quick to reassure the gang that this was nothing but a squall; temporary. Surely, the weather would clear by morning or at least might lessen its voracity. He fostered a sense of hope amongst the gang with his usual ease. 

And with that same ease, ignored the doubtful looks that Hosea and Charles bore. That had been a while ago. 

Now even those deer were gone. 

People are hungry.

Arthur, too. 

At first they rationed. They had scraps, jarred offal, a watered-down stew made from only the most undesirable of ingredients. Hardly enough to keep anyone going, but enough to keep them alive. 

Arthur pushes to his feet, unsteady, legs numb. He'd been working nonstop these last days, trying desperately to hold the gang together; to maintain some semblance of order. He hadn't dared venture out for more food, knowing if he wandered into the expansive wilderness he wouldn't come back. At least the shivering had ceased, more or less, his teeth no longer chattering every second of the day.

Dutch is there, in the main room, sitting by the fire. Hosea is beside him, the pair not so much as acknowledging one another though they briefly spare a fleeting glance up at Arthur. The fire crackled before them. They’d dismantled furniture to keep it fed, though it was barely embers. Most of the wood went to the women. 

Arthur leans against the door frame for a moment. Awash in dizziness as he is, he didn’t dare try to take a step for fear of collapsing entirely. He’s certain neither man noticed, each too consumed with their own thoughts. He blinked away the dots in his vision. Hosea and Dutch had their attention on the minuscule fire once more, as if their focus might bolster the flames. 

“Morning, fellers.”

Admittedly, Arthur wasn’t really sure what time it was. He’d been sleeping a lot, keeping odd hours; the twisted look on Dutch’s face assures him he’d guessed wrong. 

“Any of those boys come up with anything yet?” Dutch grumbles, staring at the barely-there flames.

It takes Arthur’s mind a minute to catch up; a minute to understand the change in subject. He gathers his thoughts, sluggish in the cold weather, “Last I heard, Charles was trying to map us a way down but… But it ain’t looking good. Horses weren’t doing too hot neither… I was fixin’ to go check up on everyone. I’m…” he swallowed thick again, his throat painfully dry, “I’ll be back in a bit.”

His muscles groan at the effort of standing; louder still when he walks the short, blind distance to the building that held the other men. The show was past his knees by now, pouring down the tops of his boots. 

He made it though. 

“Charles,” he hisses, holding the door shut against the hideous weather, drawing the man’s miserable attention away from his thoughts. A sharp jerk of his chin pulls Charles in towards him. Arthur lowers his voice; he couldn’t let the others hear, hotheaded as they were, that the escape they were promised is still nothing more than a few whispered words. 

“It looking any better out there?” Charles asks, as though he couldn’t hear the awful howling wind that shook the small shack.

“Still can’t see a damn inch in front of my face,” Arthur mutters, stamping the snow from his boots. He didn’t dare shed a single layer of clothing, regardless of how damp he was. Wet clothes were better than nothing. “We… We need to get these people fed. Think it’s possible for one of us to… I don’t know, head south, get off this damn mountain, find some help?”

“We’d die,” Charles says plainly, “Ain’t no one going out there and coming back... What are Dutch and Hosea thinking? Either of them got a plan yet?”

Dutch and Hosea hadn’t been doing much thinking at all. They’d been arguing; screaming non stop while they had the energy for it. Hosea blamed Dutch for this whole mess— with that, Dutch agreed, but he certainly wasn’t fond of the name calling. Arthur, of course, had a front row seat to all of it.

“They’re losing it,” Arthur admits quietly, “We all are. Dutch is too busy cryin’ over losing the O’Driscolls, since they probably cleared out before this all started, and Hosea just wants to wring his damn neck.”

“I’ll… If it comes to it, I can… I can try navigating by compass, seeing if I can’t find a path down, if this weather ever breaks. Maybe we can get some of these folks out of here, at least.”

“You keep at it,” Arthur nods, laying a firm hand on Charles’s shoulder, “And stay warm. We need you healthy.”

Charles sets his jaw, staring at Arthur with an uncomfortable intensity.

“We need you, too, Arthur.”

They didn’t. It was a platitude and nothing more. Arthur knew that. It was a hard fact to swallow, but one he’d come to terms with anyways. Frankly put, there was nothing he could do that another man here couldn’t cover. They’d get on just fine without him.

But Arthur slows; he hesitates. Turned away from Charles, hand on the door, he feels his heart in his throat. 

“Charles,” he says quietly, softly, “... We ain’t gonna make it much longer, not like this.”

“I know.”

“You uh…” Arthur squeezes his eyes shut tight, as if that might somehow save him from his own thoughts, “You ever hear of the Donner party?”

______  
  
  
  


The Adler horse was the first to go. 

He was the weakest; the newest. Arthur knew that. The poor thing wouldn’t have made it long anyways. Nobody breathed a word about it. They ate; not enough, not nearly, but better than nothing. Pearson was careful, muttering about days in the navy as he worked.

Arthur couldn’t swallow a spoonful. 

But that horse was skin and bone. Its offerings didn’t even last a week; the storm raged, unabated, unperturbed.

It took two more horses— two more weeks— to reach a breaking point. 

Arthur joined in the fray, pushed to the edge by hunger and fear. He spends every moment he isn’t sleeping screaming at Dutch and Hosea. It’s not that he blames them for any of this— it certainly wasn’t persona and if he were in his right mind he might have realized he was simply suffering cabin fever— but decried their handling of it all; their willingness to spend days at each other's throats rather than getting them out of this goddamned hell. Sometimes he screamed about their incompetence in getting them stuck here in the first place. Sometimes, he shouted for the hell of it, just to fill the awful silence. 

He tried going out— braving the lulls when the storm quieted, searching for anything edible beyond horse hide and tree bark— but found nothing. Each time, he came back weaker, worn. 

Cold, but the cold didn’t bother him quite as much. Perhaps he was adjusting. 

But the gang was wasting away, that much was obvious. They can’t afford to lose more horses either— any more than they had and there wouldn’t be enough to get everyone out when the time came. He isn’t even certain how many they have left. As it was, some would have to be doubled or tripled up— any hope of pulling more than one wagon with them was lost.

And he’s in the middle of arguing that point, as if Dutch doesn’t already know, when the world falls away. 

Arthur hits the floor hard but he doesn’t feel it. 

There’s a moment— half a second and nothing more— as his legs give out beneath him that Arthur realizes he isn’t cold at all anymore. It’s enough to make him wonder if the storm had yielded. His heartbeat stutters in his hollow chest, uneven, untethered; his head swirls, vision dark, but damn it, he isn’t cold, and that was something. 

If he’d been able to coordinate his limbs, he might have desperately shrugged off his jacket, sweltering as it was. Instead he lay, heavy as lead, wondering when Dutch had gotten so goddamned old. 

Dutch wonders the same thing.

Raw, unfettered panic grips him. He falters when Arthur’s stumbled tirade quiets and the man wavers in place— just enough for Dutch to notice, enough to finally see how awfully he’d paled and how wide-blown his pupils are. How hollow his cheeks had become. It was enough for Dutch to just _barely_ start to move as Arthur fell into a heap, his own limbs weighed upon by long weeks of unforgiving weather. Or age. Dutch wasn’t sure. He just knew he couldn’t get Arthur to wake up.

And he still can’t. 

“Hosea!” he cries, hoping the man wasn’t too pissed to hear the dread and danger in his tone. Lower, softer, he muttered comfort to Arthur, gently tapping his face in a fruitless attempt to rouse him.

Fuck, he was _freezing._

_“Hosea!”_ he roars again, his voice rattling the walls worse than the storm, and finally he is graced with the older man’s presence. Hosea surveys the scene for a second, stunned.

“What happened? What’s wrong with him?” Hosea, too, and he sounds terrified, and that was never a good sign.

“I-I don’t know, he just— he keeled over all of a sudden. I-I thought he was drunk or something, I don’t know, but he just got back and he— He just kept rambling on, figured he’d finally lost it and then— ”

Hosea’s hands search, peeling open Arthur’s damp coat and each layer underneath. Not a single one was dry; not a single one any warmer than the last. He finds no injury; he’s not sure if that’s a good thing.

“We need to— fuck, we gotta get him up and into a bed, something warm and dry. You— Dutch,” Hosea spits the name bitterly, as though it had gone foul, noticing the man’s attention had waned, staring blankly at Arthur’s unmoving form, “Dutch, listen—”

Finally, absently, Dutch peels his eyes away. Horror stricken. Scared. 

Rightly so. Arthur looks dead. 

“Throw every bit of kindling we got on that fire. I don’t care if you gotta start tearing boards off the walls, you get it nice and hot and keep it that way. Once that’s going, we gotta strip him down, try to get him some kind of warmth. I’ll go get some dry clothes.”

Dutch nods, offering one final, lingering glance at Arthur’s pale form before he could look no longer. He does as Hosea asks, and he does so with a diligence unknown to him for years. 

Arthur doesn’t stir until they start undressing him. As they peeled away each damp layer, Arthur seemed to rouse a little more, finally cracking his eyes open.

He tries to fight them off. That more than anything would stick with Dutch in the days to come; his uncoordinated, sluggish movements, pushing, pulling, begging for them to leave him be, pleading to be left alone. It sickened him. Dutch muttered apologies, wrapping Arthur in fire-warmed blankets as Hosea worked. It took the two of them to get the job done, neither man speaking besides Dutch’s symphony of comfort that poured out of him like rainwater.

Neither man says a word about the way Arthur’s bones jut out at all the wrong angles, every ounce of padding and muscle now shriveled. Neither man makes comment about the way Arthur seemed to melt away as they continued removing his layers of shirts— layers that had oh-so-deceptively hidden what had become of him. Intentionally? Neither could say. 

They wrestle him into layers upon layers of dry clothes; anything they could wrest from their drawers, anything they could find that wasn’t soaked though. They wrap him in blankets, in bodies. Dutch takes the first shift, holding Arthur by the fire, pressed close against his chest, swaddled in damn near every piece of fabric they could get their hands on. 

Hosea leaves, braving the snow beyond those walls in search of… something. He wasn’t sure what yet. Clothes, blankets, food, or perhaps just comfort that he knew he’d never find with Arthur so… so dead. 

It comes in the form of stew. 

Watered down, as he’d come to expect, hardly more than fat and bone rendered down into a gritty slurry, garnished with gristle pulled from one of their loyal steeds, but warm. The gang, upon hearing what had happened, volunteers plenty out of worry, including a tin mug of that awful stew. It was more than any of them got in a day. There buzzes among them a lingering sense of guilt, and Hosea knows exactly why. He opts to leave it unmentioned though; they know what they’ve done. 

He clutches that little cup of soup ridiculously close, willing it to stay warm long enough to do some kind of good.

Arthur is awake when he gets back. It’s only barely, and the man himself didn’t seem to realize it, gaze shifting, bleary, confused. 

Angry. 

He didn’t even react when Hosea entered; not more than fragile shivering and a pitiful, croaking whine. That’s good— Hosea knew that much. Shivering is good. His breath is still too shallow; too uneven. Too infrequent. Hosea is sure the same could be said for his pulse.

“I got… he’s gotta eat,” he directs his words to Dutch, knowing Arthur was far from coherent enough to understand. 

Dutch frowns. He looked weary in all the worst ways, as though his age finally caught up to him.

“I know.”

He knew Arthur hadn’t been eating. Not since shit hit the fan and rations ran low. 

He knew Arthur gave his portions to whoever would take it. Blatantly at first, declining to eat at all, swearing he wasn’t hungry, getting by on only quarter servings, if that. When folks got suspicious— and they did, after a few days of him refusing everything offered to him— they started handing him his rations instead of waiting for him to take them. He pawned them off on others while he could.

Dutch caught on about then. He made a sweeping statement, threatening anyone who accepted anything from Arthur on penalty of death. 

But they were hungry, and at some point that gnawing hunger was far more frightening than Dutch. They grew desperate, angry. Nobody bothered to check that Arthur was eating. Nobody cared. 

How long had it been since the man had had anything more than watered down coffee?

“Dutch he… If he doesn't... “

Dutch swallows, shaking Arthur slightly, hoping to pull him back just a little more; enough to understand.

“My boy,” he says, hoping his tone was somewhere between comforting and reassuring. Arthur doesn’t react, still twisted in the grip of incoherent fear.

“Come on now, I need you to— You gotta eat something.”

Hosea knits his brows, pressing a spoonful of soup against Arthur’s lips, hoping it might rouse him. At that, the man jerks backwards, turning his head violently away. His eyes went wide; awake, but unseeing. He thrashed, though his weak protest is easily stilled. 

“No— No I—”

“Please, son…” Anger— or frustration, he’d long since lost the ability to tell them apart— sparks in Dutch’s chest. Arthur never did listen. 

“No— They… need it.” The words are stifled, choked; only put forth with great difficulty and pain, the kind that twists in Hosea’s chest and burns in his eyes. 

“Who needs it, Arthur?” Hosea asks, trying to meet his eyeline. Gently, he lays a hand upon Arthur’s cheek, drawing his attention. Arthur locked eyes with him; lucid, if only barely.

“T-they— “ he grits out, teeth chattering, “ _They_ need it. I g-got enough, they need it…”

Arthur trails off, eyelids drooping. Dutch’s breath hitches at the feeling of Arthur sinking back into him.

“No, Arthur— Arthur, I can’t have you sleeping now, you— Dutch—” Hosea looks up at him, desperate, worried, “Dutch, can you—”

He understands without Hosea explaining. Dutch wipes the panic from his features, steeling his nerves and allowing the raw, simmering rage he felt to leak forth. He grits his teeth, certain he will immediately regret this:

_“Arthur,”_ he growls, voice low and commanding— angry, stern, in all the ways that set Arthur’s nerves aflame; all the ways that made the man jump if he wasn’t expecting it— all the ways he’d been slowly trained to fear. “Wake up and eat.”

His eyes crack open again, a visible wave of panic rolling over his pale features. He stiffens in Dutch’s hold; confused, but loyal. Listening.

“You’re going to eat, damn it,” Dutch maintains his facade, absolutely hating every second that Arthur spent dazed and frightened in his hold, blindly heeding whatever was being said even if he couldn’t understand it. It was some kind of loyalty, he’s sure, and he doesn’t want it. 

“C-can’t… _they_ …”

“They’re _fine,_ ” Dutch barks, “You’re eating. That’s an order.”

That, at least, was genuine. Genuine anger. Anger at himself; at the gang. He shouldn’t have been so careless; he should have paid closer attention to how Arthur was faring. He should have guessed that Arthur would have taken care of the gang at any cost while he and Hosea were busy wallowing.

Hosea again lifts the spoon to Arthur’s lips. 

Tentatively, blessedly, Arthur accepted it, swallowing the vile stew without so much as a grimace, though he remained stiff and uneasy in Dutch’s hold.

Not for long. Soon, half the mug is drained, one agonizing sip at a time, and Arthur is weighed upon by an overwhelming tiredness. He relaxes into the thick cocoon of blankets, safe in Dutch’s grip. Half a mug of watered-down, gelatinous broth wouldn’t do much for him. They all knew that, but it was better than nothing. It’s all they can do. 

It’s cold in Colter.

But Arthur was warm.

**Author's Note:**

> I know this one is different from my usual, but I'm testing out a few things... Namely, present-tense writing! What better way to experiment than some good ol' fashioned Arthur whump? What do y'all think? I'm not sure I'm a fan... I had planned on this one being a multi-chapter fic, but what the hell, let's do a oneshot!
> 
> ... And yes, I'm aware that the like "You ever hear of the Donner party?" carries certain connotations... But no cannibalism here! Not this time at least ;)


End file.
